Mission

Advance the state of the art in emerging Internet applications using a human-centered approach

Research objectives

Explore the technical, economic, social, and ethical issues raised by the design of ubiquitous, context-aware, adaptive, human-centric computer ecosystems

The figure below shows the anatomy of a typical, ubiquitous, context-aware, adaptive, human-centric computer ecosystem—also called smart process applications (SPAs). Such applications use IoT devices for context awareness, to capture data about the user and their environment.

Such data is relayed, through edge devices, to the cloud for processing. After filtering and aggregation, the data follows two parallel threads:

• 1) a synchronous thread, where the system responds to the most recent event data based on stored data, knowledge, and inferences about the user and their environment (the Act task), and

• 2) an asynchronous thread that digests both the input data and the system’s response to build and refine its models of the user and of the environment, enabling it to adapt to changes in either, or to improve its performance.